We are pleased to announce the publication of more than 800 newspaper editorials, likely authored by Whitman, that appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Times in the late 1850s. This project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, marks the first time that most of these editorials have appeared in print since their initial publication and represents a major reconsideration of Whitman's work during this period.
We are pleased to unveil our redesigned website, the work of several years and many individuals, and made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Users may notice changes, large and small, including reorganization of the site's major sections; improvements to image browsing, searching and faceting of results, and support for mobile devices; as well as new content. Other changes and improvements will be less obvious but are important for the sustainability of the project. Please note: We are continuing to make adjustments and correct errors introduced during the site overhaul. We thank you for your patience as we work to improve the experience for the Archive's users.
With the generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), we have published 527 additional letters. The newly published correspondence includes 73 letters from the Pre-Civil War period (1840-1860), 4 from the Civil War period (1861-1865), 363 from the Reconstruction era (1866-1876), 28 from the Post-Reconstruction era (1877-1887), and 60 from the Late-Life period (1888-1892).
Great news! The Archive has been awarded a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for work on "The Late Life Writings of Walt Whitman." The grant will focus on the editing of two experimental mixtures of prose and verse, November Boughs (1888) and Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), along with more than 300 manuscripts that contributed to their development.
The Transatlantic Walt Whitman Association has announced that the thirteenth international Whitman seminar—postponed for three years because of the pandemic—will be held this coming June 12-17 at Sapienza University of Rome, with a symposium on "War and Peace: Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings" on June 16–17. Details about the seminar and symposium, including instructions for applying and the symposium CFP, are available here.
With the generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), we have published 459 additional letters. The newly published correspondence from Whitman's Late-Life period includes 418 letters, as well as 38 from the Post-Reconstruction period (1877-1887), 2 from the Reconstruction era (1866-1876), and 1 from the Civil War
Elisa New's Poetry in America series, produced by WGBH in Boston and telecast by PBS, has recently released a new episode on Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser" as a follow-up to an earlier episode on Leaves of Grass. The Walt Whitman Archive has been a partner on this project, and we are grateful to the Poetry in America team for their generous donation to help support the Archive's work.
With sadness, we note the passing of Joel Myerson, a pillar of American literary studies and a much-valued Whitman Archive advisory board member. Joel shared what he knew (and often what he owned) in ways as generous to Whitman scholarship as he was to those in the numerous other areas of his expertise. He will be greatly missed.
With the generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), we have published 459 additional letters. The newly published correspondence from Whitman's Late-Life period includes 458 letters, as well as 1 letter from the Reconstruction period.
Great news! To honor the breakthrough work on the Walt Whitman Archive's Variorum of Leaves of Grass (1855), Nicole Gray and her collaborators have been awarded the Finneran Prize from the Society of Textual Scholarship (STS) given in recognition of the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during the two calendar years since the previous award. This is the first time STS has given this award to a digital edition or archive.
Thanks to a collaboration with art historian Ruth Bohan, we have published a new, curated selection of art reviews that Whitman wrote while editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Bohan, these 27 new articles add to the growing collection of Whitman's journalism available on the Archive.
The Whitman Archive is pleased to present a completely redesigned and updated gallery of portraits of Whitman. The new version of the gallery offers an easier and more robust search, improved scans of many of the portraits, and a revised set of notes about all of Whitman’s photographers. The index page of the gallery now allows users to see thumbnail versions of all the portraits on one page; clicking on any thumbnail image brings up a large scan of the image, along with information about the place, date, creator, and circumstances of the photograph, as well as information about the physical image and its location.
With the generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), we have published 464 additional letters. The newly published correspondence includes 453 letters from 1890 and 1891—the heart of Whitman's Late-Life period (1888-1892)—and 11 letters from the Post-Reconstruction period.
The Whitman Archive is delighted to announce the publication of a variorum edition of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). This edition includes the complete text of Whitman's first book of poems, variants and insertions among printed copies, manuscript and notebook antecedents, related periodical publications, and a bibliographical list of surviving copies in collections around the world. The result of three years of work by a team of Archive scholars led by Nicole Gray, and supported by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, this edition is one of the most innovative and revelatory projects ever undertaken by the Walt Whitman Archive.
The Whitman Archive is pleased to announce that Matt Cohen has been named a project co-director. Cohen's involvement with the Archive stretches back to his graduate student days at the College of William & Mary, and continued through his time at Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, and now at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. During that time, Cohen has been a contributor to or editor of the work on the bibliography, Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden, Whitman's Spanish-language translations, marginalia and annotations, and numerous other projects. He has published extensively on Whitman, and his book, Whitman's Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution, appeared in 2017. Congratulations to Matt on this well-deserved promotion.
We have published images and a full transcription of Whitman's massive cultural geography scrapbook, along with transcriptions of dozens of related manuscripts. We have also published a series of original essays that explore prevalent themes in this new material, as well as Whitman's Reading: A Bibliographical Handlist, a new resource in which we have begun tracking all of the texts that Whitman is known to have read. We would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for their generous support of this work
With the generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), we have published 427 additional letters from 1889 and 1890, the early years of Whitman's Late-Life period (1888-1892).
We have created a new section of the Archive dedicated to letters that Whitman wrote on behalf of soldiers during the Civil War, providing transcriptions and images of all such known letters.
We have published transcriptions of 19 additional editorials likely written by Whitman as the editor of the New York Aurora.
In honor of Whitman's 200th birthday, International Walt Whitman Week 2019 will be held in Whitman's New York. For more information and the application to the seminar, click here.
With the generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), we have published 280 additional letters from 1888 and 1889, the first years of Whitman's Late-Life period (1888-1892).
Whitman's 1858 newspaper series Manly Health and Training has just been published, with an introduction and annotations by Zachary Turpin (University of Idaho). We have also published 20 new editorials likely written by Whitman for the New York Aurora. Additionally, we have written editorial notes for each piece of journalism, explaining the Archive's rationale for attributing the piece to Whitman in the absence of an explicit "Walt Whitman" byline.
We have just published a bibliography of over 100 translations of Whitman into Polish, annotated by Marta Skwara (University of Szczecin).
We have just published transcriptions of 39 editorials likely written by Whitman as the editor of the New York Aurora. In order to foreground the distinction between Whitman as a newspaper writer and Whitman as a newspaper editor, we have also created a new section of the Archive devoted to Whitman's newspaper editing. Along with the Aurora material, we have also published a new introduction to Whitman and the Aurora, written for the Archive by Jason Stacy.
With support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we've published 252 letters from 1888, the first year of the Late-Life period.
Thanks to the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, we've now published 118 additional manuscripts and five more notebooks from Whitman's early years. We've also updated the index pages for the manuscripts and notebooks so users can search the documents and sort them by date. This work, completed as part of the project "Walt Whitman as an Author before Leaves of Grass," was a team effort, with important contributions from Brett Barney, Stephanie Blalock, Janel Cayer, Jonathan Cheng, Kirsten Clawson, Eric Conrad, Karin Dalziel, Sara Duke, Jessica Dussault, Ed Folsom, Nikki Gray, Kirby Little, Liz Lorang, Kevin McMullen, Natalie O'Neal, Ken Price, Stefan Schöberlein, and Jeannette Schollaert.
A Whitman novel previously unknown to scholars has been discovered by University of Houston graduate student Zachary Turpin. Life and Adventures of Jack Engle was published in The Sunday Dispatch in 1852. Find the novel and an introduction by Turpin in the new double issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. You can read more about the discovery and plot of the novel in a recent New York Times article.
A new section of the Archive devoted to Whitman's short fiction is now available. Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for support of this work. Our section devoted to Whitman's fiction, now consists of all of his known short stories, two versions of his novel Franklin Evans, and a bibliography and map of publications and reprints of the fiction.
With support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we've published 246 additional letters from 1887, the final year of the Post-Reconstruction era, and from 1888, the first year of the Late-Life period. We have also published Whitman's early journalistic series, "The Sun-Down Papers," with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Great news! The Archive has been awarded a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for work on "Unearthing the 'buried masterpiece' of American Literature: A Digital Variorum of the 1855 Leaves of Grass." The Archive has also been awarded a one-year grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for work on "Fame and Infamy: Walt Whitman's Old Age Correspondence."
Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill are teaching a new open online course, "Whitman's Civil War: Writing and Imaging Loss, Death, And Disaster," from July 18 to September 5, 2016. Registration is free and is available here.
With support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we've published 67 additional letters from the post-Reconstruction years.
A new Whitman journalistic series has been discovered by University of Houston graduate student Zachary Turpin! "Manly Health and Training" was published in the New York Atlas in 1858. Find the series and an introduction by Turpin in the new double issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. You can read more about the discovery and content of the series in a recent New York Times article, as well as a blog post by Stephanie Blalock of the University of Iowa Libraries.
The Ninth Annual International Whitman Week Seminar and Symposium will be held at the University of Exeter in England, from May 30 to June 4, 2016. For more information and a call for papers, click here.
A new section of the Archive devoted to Whitman's marginalia and annotations is now available. This section features more than 800 searchable pages of Whitman's markings on books and notes about his reading. Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for support of this work.
With support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we've published 74 additional letters from the post-Reconstruction years.
The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review has now gone open access. All 32 years of the journal are freely available on the WWQR website and via links from the Whitman Archive bibliography.
Descriptions and images of over 500 of Whitman's prose manuscripts are now available as part of the NEH-funded Integrated Catalog of Whitman's Literary Manuscripts. This is an expansion of the Archive's earlier work on Whitman's poetry manuscripts. And in a new Interviews and Reminiscences section, we have added nearly 100 accounts of meetings with Whitman
With support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we've published 376 additional letters from the Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction years.
A new section of the Archive devoted to Whitman's fiction is now available, including Whitman's short temperance novel Franklin Evans with a new critical introduction, as well as an revised version of the novel titled "Fortunes of a Country-Boy," which was serialized over twelve issues in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. This section also includes a bibliography and a map of reprints of Whitman's fiction. Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for support of this work.
Five of Whitman's early notebooks are now available on the Archive as part of our work on the NEH-funded project "Walt Whitman as an Author before Leaves of Grass."
A newly discovered poem by Whitman and information on the New Era have been added to the Poems in Periodicals section.
An additional 92 letters from the Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction years are now available on the Archive. The publication of these letters was made possible by the support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
The Eighth Annual International Whitman Week Seminar and Symposium will be held at Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität in Munich, Germany, from July 27 to August 1, 2015. For more information and a call for papers, click here.
With support from the NHPRC, we've published more than 800 letters from the post-Reconstruction years. We have also added several additional installments to Whitman's journalism.
Whitman's journalistic series New York Dissected is now available on the Archive as part of our growing collection of Whitman's journalism. Thanks go to NEH for support of this work.
Great news! The Archive has been awarded a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to continue its work on Whitman's post-Reconstruction correspondence.
Whitman's early journalistic series "Letters from Paumanok" is now available on the Archive as part of our work on the NEH-funded project "Walt Whitman as an Author before Leaves of Grass."
With support from NHPRC, we've added 170 letters from Louisa Van Velsor Whitman to her son Walt. These letters illuminate the most important relationship in the poet's life and offer a rare glimpse into the emotional life of a working-class nineteenth-century American woman. Wesley Raabe's introduction provides more information.
"Every Atom: Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself,'" an open online course, will be offered by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill from February 17 to March 29, 2014. For more information about the course, click here.
The installment of nearly 100 scribal documents added to the Whitman Archive in June 2013 brings to a close the first phase of the Archive's work with the pieces Whitman produced as a clerk in the Attorney General's office from 1865–1873. From December 2011 to June 2013, we've published roughly 3,000 of these documents—all of them letters—as part of the NHPRC-sponsored project "Walt Whitman and Reconstruction." In the future, Archive staff aim to add another approximately 400 documents on which Whitman collaborated while in the Attorney General's office. These documents include letters in the hand of another clerk for which Whitman has provided short marginal annotations, apparently for indexing purposes, as well as summaries of legal cases and office notes in Whitman's hand, such as the "Memorandum of Examination of Nott & Co's Claim—with order," from February 1869. We would like to provide annotations for all of the scribal documents and possibly enrich the encoding of them, though it is not yet clear when we will have the time and resources to reach these goals.
NHPRC support has helped us add 450 scribal documents to the Archive, bringing the total to nearly 3,000.
With the support of the Obermann Center at the University of Iowa, we've revised and expanded the Translations section of the Archive, which now includes more than thirty versions of Whitman's "Poets to Come" in five languages, as well as original translations of "Chants Democratic 14" from the 1860 Leaves. To learn more about the "Poets to Come" project, visit the Translations page and read Ed Folsom's "Translating 'Poets to Come': An Introduction."
The addition of this new material coincides with other changes to the architecture and arrangement of the Archive. Notably, the new section, Translations, replaces the Editions Printed Outside the U.S. section, which previously included full-length translations of Whitman as well as British editions. The British editions are now available via the new Books by Whitman section of the Archive. This change is one of several to Published Works, which formerly included sections for Leaves of Grass, other books by Whitman, periodicals, and editions of Whitman published outside the United States. The revamped Published Works now includes Books by Whitman, Periodicals, and Translations. In the coming months, we will continue to work with the Books by Whitman section to improve navigation through the materials.
All volumes of Horace Traubel's /disciples/traubel are now available. We've also added page images of Leaves of Grass Imprints and PDFs of 19 books from the University of Iowa Press Whitman series.
The first installment of Whitman's Civil War journalism is now available.
We've published more than 250 letters from the Reconstruction years. Whitman's complete two-way correspondence of the period will be available in the fall. The publication of these letters was made possible by the support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Update: Nearly 450 letters are now available (May 21, 2012).
New Civil War notebooks added: visits to hospitals, stories from soldiers, and the Grand Review of the Union army.
Great news! The Whitman Archive has been awarded a $275,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create item-level finding guides to the nearly seventy individual repositories holding Whitman’s prose manuscripts. We will attach to each description high-quality digital images for all the prose manuscripts. We have developed a system of identification which will embed in a union finding aid the relationships between Whitman's prose manuscripts and the conceptual "work" they contribute to: for example, the final manifestation of the prose draft, most often the version Whitman published in his final collection, Complete Prose Works (1892). With this system, we will create an overarching guide to a virtual collection of all of Whitman's manuscripts, organized not around their physical location but according to the conceptual "work" that they contribute to. A fragment of a manuscript at Duke University about Whitman's memories of Lincoln will be visible in its connections to his Memoranda During the War, as well as to all the other related manuscripts at other repositories. When coupled with the Whitman Archive's similarly organized and award-winning guides to Whitman's poetry manuscripts, this project will provide unprecedented documentation of and access to the literary manuscripts of a major literary figure.
We've added more than 1,100 new items to the Scribal Documents section of the Archive, bringing the total number of documents available there to nearly 2,000. In the near future, look for other new content, including Reconstruction-era correspondence and Civil War journalism, notebooks, and prose manuscripts.
Over the next few months, the Whitman Archive will expand dramatically: we will add more than 2,000 previously unidentified government documents in Whitman's handwriting, 600 pieces of personal correspondence from the Reconstruction period, and an array of materials—prose manuscripts, notebooks, and journalism—completed as part of the NEH-funded project, "Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings." We will also reorganize and add new content to the translations section of the Archive (currently titled "Editions Printed Outside the U.S."). As we roll out this new content, we will make updates to the Archive homepage. Users will notice revised section heads, new organization, and links to additional content. These changes will affect other pages of the Archive as well—primarily the index pages to different parts of the site. These pages, too, will have new names and new content. For example, as part of the publication of the first 800 scribal documents on the Archive, we have renamed the Manuscripts section of the Archive "In Whitman's Hand." This new name carries through to the index page for this section, where users can access the full range of content grouped under the "In Whitman's Hand" category. In anticipation of upcoming changes, we have also started reorganizing content on the home page. We have, for example, moved the finding aids to Whitman's manuscript materials to the Resources section of Archive. As we continue to make changes to the home page and to add content, we will keep users informed here and on the Archive's change-log.
Matt Cohen, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, has received an NEH grant for his project "Walt Whitman's Annotations." As described in the grant application, this project will "preserve and give free public electronic access to Walt Whitman's manuscript annotations. This hitherto uncollected and largely unpublished set of extraordinarily diverse and sophisticated documents shows Americas most famous poet in-the-making. From classical writings to Tennyson, from Persian poets to phrenological journals, the influences on Whitman's work were manifold. For the first time, students, scholars, and casual readers will be able to explore the fertile ground of Whitman's self-education, through his reactions to the literature, history, science, theology, and art of his time. Whitman's reactions range from the caustic to the puzzled to the awestruck, and take the form of everything from simply underlining significant passages to full-length expository responses."
Cohen continues, "While electronically gathering, preserving, and making freely available these documents would alone be a tremendous step forward, we are in the position to do much more. First, the context of the Walt Whitman Archive gives us the power to link these annotated documents to later ones they influenced. Second, we will publish a database of Whitman's reading—a kind of virtual library of one of the worlds most important literary figures. And finally, using a customized search engine and the interface we created under the start-up grant, we will offer analytical tools for users of the archive that will help researchers shed new light on Whitman's writing in the broad context of nineteenth-century literature and culture."
On April 12, the National Archives announced Ken Price's discovery of nearly 3,000 Whitman documents. A video the National Archives produced for the occasion and one by UNL are available online.
Page images and complete transcriptions of Whitman's Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps are now available.
Page images of the New York Aurora, a newspaper Whitman edited in early 1842, are now available.
Whitman's Complete Prose Works (1892) and Memoranda During the War (1876) are now available on the Archive.
Great news! The Archive has been awarded a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to continue its work on Whitman's correspondence from the end of the Civil War through Reconstruction.
The Civil War correspondence of Whitman is now available. In editing more than 600 letters, the Whitman Archive has created the first two-way correspondence treating these key years in Whitman's life. Thanks go to the NHPRC for support of this work.
Hans Reisiger's German translation of selected poetry and prose by Whitman has been added to the Archive's foreign editions section.
Images of Whitman's Blue Book have recently been added to the site and are available here. The Blue Book is Whitman's personal—and very heavily revised—copy of the third edition of Leaves of Grass. This is the book that cost Whitman his government job in 1865. For more on that controversy, see William Douglas O'Connor's "The Good Gray Poet".
Great news! The Archive meets its fundraising goal for the NEH challenge grant. Thanks to all contributors.
The Archive has recently received grants to edit Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings. Funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) will support editorial work on Whitman's incoming and outgoing correspondence. Funding from the NEH will support editorial work on Whitman's Civil War notebooks, daybooks, literary essays, journalism, poetry manuscripts, and his so-called Blue Book (a personally annotated copy of Leaves of Grass that cost him his government job). Ken Price has received an ACLS Digital Innovation Award to support his role in these editorial efforts.
Two Russian-language translations of Whitman; the third volume of With Walt Whitman in Camden; and an editorial policy statement.
The reviews newly added to the site are reprinted from a recent issue of Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. These reviews span the entire range of Whitman's poetic career, from his temperance novel Franklin Evans (1842) to the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891-1892). These reviews represent the views of critics on both sides of the Atlantic (and include Irish and Scottish perspectives). The reviews treat a wide range of Whitman's publications, addressing every edition and the so-called deathbed printing of Leaves of Grass, as well as "A Child's Reminiscence," As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, Two Rivulets, Memoranda during the War, November Boughs, Good-Bye My Fancy, William Michael Rossetti's 1868 British edition (Poems by Walt Whitman), and Ernest Rhys's 1886 British edition (Leaves of Grass: The Poems of Walt Whitman).
We've now been more than five years in phase two of the Archive, 2000-2006, and again arguments for a redesign are becoming compelling. The reason for even considering a redesign boils down to the problems associated with frame-based layouts. In the current view, one of our typical pages is actually made up of four distinct frames. Three of the frames are stable, allowing the navigation bar to remain in one constant place on the screen as the text scrolls down. But there are disadvantages to this design. Printing is a problem since a printer ordinarily will print a sheet for each frame. Searching is an even bigger problem: a person who uses an internet search engine to find, say, Pfaff's at the Whitman Archive will get our online biography but without any of the three "stable" frames, so the page is shorn of the navigation bar and all obvious indications that the person is even at the Whitman Archive.
Most of these problems have been resolved through the use of CSS-based layout, which is becoming a more common way for large web sites to deal with similar display issues. Each page will print more easily, have a unique and visible URL, and will overall be more easily navigable. It is important to move our design forward with technology standards and tastes to keep current.
The Whitman Archive has been fortunate to receive a great deal of positive publicity. Wai Chee Dimock recently remarked: “The Walt Whitman Archive is not just chronicling literary history of the past; it is making literary history at this very moment—a history of variants, each speaking to its particular locale, a continuum of 'exaptation' that might well resemble the evolution and adaptation of biological species” (PMLA October 2007). And William Pannapacker and Paul Crumbley in the current volume of American Literary Scholarship, indicate that the Archive “may be the most important editorial undertaking in the history of Whitman studies.” The Archive has also received very positive notice recently in publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Scholar.
The Society of American Archivists has awarded the Walt Whitman Archive the prestigious C.F.W. Coker Award, based on the IMLS-funded Integrated Guide to the Dispersed Manuscripts of Walt Whitman. Kay Walter and Ken Price co-directed the grant; other participants from UNL were: Mary Ellen Ducey, Brian Pytlik Zillig, Andrew Jewell, Brett Barney and various graduate students.
We are delighted to announce that the University of Nebraska–Lincoln has been offered a $500,000 "We the People" NEH challenge grant to support the building of a permanent endowment for the Walt Whitman Archive. The grant carries a 3 to 1 matching requirement, and thus we need to raise $1.5 million dollars in order to receive the NEH funds. Building an endowment will allow us to retain key staff and will enable the work of the Archive to continue.
Read more at the Support page.